War Flower

by Brooke King

  *

  There was no word from home yet. Many of us were wondering what they were seeing, how the war was portrayed back there. I stopped telling my family about the war when I made my monthly call to tell them that I was still alive. My cell phone calls to California were a 2:00 a.m. wake-up that my grandparents gladly accepted.

  I called them the day Saddam Hussein was hanged, the day I had been injured. It had been a violent one; our base took more than its usual number of daily mortar attacks. VBIEDs at each gate. Daisy-chained explosives set at a guard tower along the back wall. Massive attacks throughout the city. The Paladin tanks of 1-82 Artillery were working overtime to keep the insurgents at bay.

  I had time after end of day formation to call home. The groggy voice of Grandpa answering the phone, fumbling to put it on speaker so that Nana could hear, calmed me down; the sound of background noise, a reminder of home. I wanted to reach through the phone for a hug but said hello instead. The usual hello back was followed up by how was I doing, but then Nana asked me the only question I didn’t want to answer: What I was doing over here? I couldn’t bear to tell her that I was a number of things, worst of all a collector of bodies. I told her of trucks I worked on, friends I met, but never missions or attacks—never those. She asked me if anyone had died today. The static of the phone connection broke the silence on my end. I didn’t tell her about Saddam or that fact that I had tried to take out a pea-sized piece of shrapnel from my shin, that it was still bleeding underneath my uniform, that my head was still pounding from my head hitting the concrete wall, or how I spent the better part of my afternoon after my injury out on mission. I cleared my throat and told her that I had heard a few soldiers had been killed in First Cav but that they were no one I knew. She told me of a news report she saw on the TV, a helicopter crash in Baghdad, civilians and soldiers, she said, with a shakiness in her voice. Six dead. Angry, because I knew the news report once again fucked up the facts, I told her that I knew how many civilians and soldiers died and the reason why the chopper was shot down. I told her to stop watching the news, that the liberal media may be telling her the count, but the facts were wrong and the order of events incomplete. She sighed into the phone but agreed. I asked about home. She proceeded to tell me about everyone in the family. My cousins were doing great. Erika was graduating high school soon, Emma was playing soccer goalie and doing well at it, Anthony had stopped playing football, but she avoided mention of Dad and my brother, John, so I asked about John. There was silence. I knew that something was wrong. I probed, but she said that she didn’t want me to worry and I knew now that it was bad. I asked if he was dead. She replied no, but before I could demand that she tell me what was going on, sirens went off on base. I could hear the panic in her voice when she asked what the noise was. I told her I had to go, there was an incoming mortar attack happening. As I tried to get out the words “I love you,” Commo Hill got hit, the phone went dead, and the base fell silent and black. The busy signal screeched from inside my pocket as I ran to the nearest bunker.

  Phone calls home became less regular after that and then almost nonexistent. It made it easier to disconnect from the reality that back home everyone was going about their lives as though I were already dead. To me, calling only satisfied them that I was still alive, and yet I didn’t call because I was callous; it was because part of me already felt dead. The war had a way of doing it to you if you saw too much, making it harder to pull back on your humanity and remember that not everyone is trying to kill you and that not everything will blow up. Phone calls made you complacent about that fact. They reminded you that you were at war and that this place was a far cry from anything that could remotely be called home. This was not home. This was a fresh new level of hell, and I had volunteered to walk through the fire.

  Waiting

  Private Dupree sat at the bus stop waiting for the hajji bus to come pick her up for work. She rolled the metal links from her dog tag chain in her mouth, contemplating the conversation she had had last night with her roommate, Specialist Hooper, about not being able to handle the deployment, the long months spent away from her family, her grandmother. Hooper only nodded to her, telling her that like anything hard in life, it’s best to keep your head down and keep moving. Would she be able to endure the rest of the deployment? She didn’t know, but the longer she sat there, the more she moved the metal back and forth, until the clanking sound of metallic disruption vibrated in her ears the way Tibetan tingsha meditation cymbals slap together to create a long, resonating sound reflective of a hungry ghost begging to be reborn again.

  I wasn’t there when the mortar round came into base and blew up the bus stop, wounding Private Dupree. I was in the convoy staging area listening to the NCOIC give a convoy brief. Sergeant Lippert stood there spitting brown tobacco on the ground in clumped streams while the new soldiers hurriedly scribbled down call signs, route info, checkpoint locations, and truck ordering. Other soldiers PMCS’d their trucks and checked tires, ratchet straps on the payloads, headlights, flashlights, and NVGs. Some stood around smoking Marlboro Reds, Parliaments, or Camel Lights. Others just stood there with their hands ruffed around the collar of their flak vest, waiting to roll out. The gunners checked their canisters of ammo, goggles, headsets, and piss cups. Some oiled down the bolt on their weapon, while others checked to make sure they had a case each of water, Rip It energy drinks, and shitty Otis Spunkmeyer muffins. When the convoy brief was done, the drivers started up their engines like Indy car drivers, checking and double-checking gauges, looking at the fuel levels, engine temp, battery life, and brakes. The radio hands conducted comm checks with battalion and the convoy commander. Across the base Private Dupree was sitting at the bus stop waiting for her ride to work while I stood in the convoy staging area pulling drags of deep gray smoke from my unfiltered Lucky Strike and pretended to care about Sergeant Lippert’s preconvoy prayer.

  Lord, keep us safe today . . .

  Throughout the base the sirens blared the warning to seek shelter, and it was then that the shells came hurtling into base. Inside a concrete bunker beyond the staging area, I was safe. In the distance a plume of smoke permeated the sky. Inside the trucks the sound of radio chatter buzzed and crackled, and it was then that I knew one of us had been injured. From my concreted spot I could see the main road on base and the Charlie Company doctors running half-dressed to their medevac Humvees. In a cloud of dust and kicked-up rocks, their wheels screeched out of the battalion headquarters parking lot and down the road toward the plume of smoke, which had turned from gray to black.

  I didn’t know Private Dupree very well. We had gone to basic training together, but she was in a different company than me. They say she sustained shrapnel wounds to her body and that is wasn’t too bad. She would live. Either way, I sat with Specialist Hooper, one of her good friends, all night, waiting until she felt like talking. We sat there in silence.

  *

  When I was in middle school, I sometimes took the city bus home when Nana couldn’t pick me up. I sat in the back of the bus, watched everyone file in and sit down, and then watched as they got up and left when it was their stop. It took two buses to get home, one of which I hopped on at Mission Gorge Road, the 113, but when I got on one day and walked to the back, I saw her, a ghost of my childhood—my sister, Courtney. You see, my parents had divorced when I was two, or was it three? The number always changed when I asked Dad.

  The circumstance surrounding my parents’ divorce went like this: Mom left for work one day and didn’t come home for a year; she ran off with another man, who is now my stepdad, Fred; distraught, my father made his first attempt at suicide; it didn’t work; he got his shit together, worked two jobs and did night school to support my twin half sisters Ashley and Courtney, me, and my little brother, John; Nana and Grandpa helped out a lot; Dad asked Grandpa Blanton where Mom was, how he could find her, and if she would ever come back; he answered that it was complicated and involved; Dad decided since he didn�
��t know when my mom was coming home, it was best to adopt my twin sisters; a week before the hearing, Mom came back, filed divorce papers, and told Dad what had happened; Dad tried suicide again; the court mandated that Mom take all four children, but she refused; Dad contested that he was more capable of taking care of John and me than Mom could ever be because, as he puts it still to this day, “She’s a selfish conniving lying cunt who deserves to go to hell”; all of this is said by my dad with a smile; while the events after the final divorce hearing are vague and most of which will not be told to me until I turned sixteen, my understanding is that Mom refused to pay child support for John and me and then disappeared.

  While all of this is somewhat like the typical divorce story, the next part is fucked up, even for my standards. Courtney noticed me on the bus, sat beside me, and asked what I was doing in San Diego in her part of the city. I told her that we lived off of Del Cerro Boulevard with Nana and Grandpa. She looked at me shocked. She relayed to me that she and Ashley were attending Patrick Henry High School up the road, that she is the next bus stop, and for me to follow her home. So I do. I waited hours for Mom to get home with Ashley, who had track practice that day. Courtney helped me with my homework and made me a cheese quesadilla with salsa, and we caught up on what we had missed in each other’s lives. At twelve or thirteen, it wasn’t much. Mom walked in the door, Ashley in tow behind her carrying groceries. Mom yelled for help, and when I came through the kitchen toward the living room, she dropped all of the groceries on the entryway tile. She asked what I was doing there, how I had found her, and when I relayed my story, she walked past me coldly, called my dad, and made me go sit on the brown leather couch in the living room. She didn’t speak a word; she just stood there staring at me as though this little stunt was my dad’s idea to fuck with her.

  Dad came of course, they got into a fight, Dad dragged me home, and John and I started seeing Mom on the regular after that; it was no longer just phone calls on birthdays and Christmas. She could no longer hide from us now. My mother had been living a half mile away from me almost my whole life, and it wasn’t until I saw Courtney on the bus that day that I knew how selfish my mother really was.

  So there it is—the story of divorce no one wants to hear, that every person hopes won’t happen to them, and the one every divorce child knows well. Of course my mother has gotten better since then. She’s so proud of her little soldier who went off to war and fought bad guys. She loves me now that I’m grown up with children of my own. I had waited my whole life to have a relationship with my mother, and the irony was that it took me going to war for my mother to begin to love me again. It took an act of bravery and sacrifice on my part, the possibility of my death, in order for my mother to back into my life. Even now, when she tells me she loves me, I’m not quite sure she means it, but I say the empty “I love you” back, hoping one day that we will both be sincere when we say it.

  I guess what bothered me about the whole divorce thing was that I never fully understood why my dad kept us. He was a total wreck, not fit to take care of himself, and yet I am thankful he didn’t give up on us. Sure, he was a drunk, a druggie, and absentee some of the time, but he admitted his shortcomings. Like all good fathers, he was there when he needed to be, was present for the things that mattered, like soccer coaching, dancing in the kitchen to music that the neighbors across the street could hear, and challenging his kids. Although, now that I’m thinking about it, my dad’s definition of challenging his child to do better was radically different than that of most traditional, conventional, or even seminormal parental units, but his way never seemed to bother me. Maybe it was because I was just like him or maybe it was because his parenting skills made everything fun. That was my dad, the fun parent.

  I remember a game we used to play on the way home from school when I was elementary age. In fact Dad and I still play it to this day. Dad would turn on the radio to the rock station or put on a Grateful Dead cassette tape, and before the lyrics would start, he would ask me who the band was and the name of the song. If it was the Grateful Dead, he would ask me the name of the song, and when the singer started, he’d question me as to who was singing, Jerry, Bob, or Phil. Each time I got part of it wrong, he would swerve the car side to side until I got part or all of the answer correct. If I got it right off the bat without guessing, he would give me a huge smile that was usually accompanied by, “Right on, Brookerdoo.” I guess it was his way of culturing me the only real way he knew how, but for me it was a game of chicken. Sometimes I would guess the wrong answer on purpose just to see how far he was willing to go, waiting to see how much he would keep up the charade before John pissed his pants from screaming in fear or I gave too many wrong answers that would have made us crash. Either way, my dad’s version of parenting was fun, totally fucked up, but fun. So I guess the trick to real parenting is to be totally fucked up. That was easier for some parents than others, especially in a radically religious country like Iraq.

  *

  He slit her throat. Alonso had said it nonchalantly, as if it were common practice for fathers to kill their young. She pulled a drag from her cigarette, tilted her patrol cap down to her brow line, and lowered her head to look at the dirt. I wanted to shoot him, but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to fuck his world up. Let that son of a bitch taste what metal felt like as it burrowed into his skin, but they wouldn’t let me. It’s not our fight, they said. He’s not our problem. But what the fuck are we fighting for? What are we here to accomplish? I looked at Alonso, waiting for her to tell me the rest of the story, but she never did. She gripped harder on the butt of the smoke between her fingers as they trembled—the anger still burning on her skin, branding her thoughts. We never talked about what happened to the girl again. It was only a bottle of water. Why the fuck would someone kill their child over a bottle of water?

  Part 2

  Born for the Kill

  The Carbine Autopsy

  Metal. Black. New, but not too new.

  This was my rifle. There were many like it, but this one was mine.

  It lay in pieces before me, disemboweled from butt to muzzle. I cleaned it with baby wipes, removed the dirt that filled its crevices. Q-tips saturated with oil cleansed it, taking away the years it hadn’t been in my care.

  The wafting stench of oxidized metal, rusty parts, and synthetic oils coagulated in the air, raising the odor level just to bearable. Sweat dripped down my temple as I labored on with the hard work, disassembling the guts—puzzle pieces I barely had recollection of how to correctly put back together. I was new—an apprentice to the labor of cleaning the body down and carefully removing delicate parts. My hands weren’t made for such a delicate procedure as this—the task required gentle but firm hands. Mine were scarred, calloused, and rough—mechanic’s hands. Had I been properly trained beforehand, such a task wouldn’t be foreign, but I sat there anyway, the body splayed out before me, gutted of its innards, like a human corpse on an autopsy table. I examined the parts. The feel of each one in my hand raised my curiosity. What does each part do? I picked them up one by one. As if coated in some sort of sinew, they slipped and slid the more tightly I tried to grip them. Next I turned my attention to the body. It was cold, chilled by the air-conditioning that ran through the building. Its hard plastic parts were stamped with a serial number. Its rough neck was serrated with railing, edged so that the limbs could be easily switched out, changed for new parts or accessories added to create a better killing machine.